Personal care compositions must be effective at delivering active ingredients (such as sunscreens, moisturizers, styling polymers, conditioning polymers, and others), while still having good aesthetic properties (tactile, visual, and the like). In fact, aesthetic properties are of paramount importance in personal care, because a consumer associates these properties with performance and value.
When it comes to lotions and creams, a light, fluffy, airy texture is highly valued by consumers. As can be appreciated, it is difficult to incorporate the necessary active ingredients and create such a texture, it is more difficult still to maintain such a texture through the variable and sometimes extreme conditions faced by the product during packaging, transporting, and vending before it arrives in the hands of the consumer. Even were a desirable texture obtainable, traditional rheology modifiers, such as ASE (alkali-soluble emulsion), HASE (Hydrophobically modified alkali-soluble emulsion), HEC (Hydroxyethyl Cellulose), starch, clay, or other natural polymers, do not preserve desirable texture upon exposure to high temperature (also known as heat-aging).
Accordingly, it would be desirable to find new materials to impart improved aesthetics to personal care compositions that also provide stability over time and exhibit a reduced degree of thinning.